As we have seen over and over in the past week, feminist are rarely, if ever, in full agreement on any topic. We may have general goals that we share, for example full equity for women, but as for how we go about that, it varies. I have even seen women who are vehemently anti-feminist, but use that anti-feminism as their path for making things better for the lives of women. Who is to say how the lives of women are best served?
I was once accused by a friend of being detrimental to the feminist cause because I work to help women. Helping women, they argued, was essentializing that there exists a homogenous group labeled “women.” This is not the perfect way to proceed. Every time you do any work you need to have a full acknowledgement of all of the philosophical pitfalls of what you’re doing. Except then each time we wanted to say anything or do anything, we would end up writing a book of philosophy that still has no good solution and nothing would ever get better. This is one practice I don’t agree with, though I still think we should be asking hard questions about the implications of our work. The thing is, I just don’t care. I look at the women being sexually assaulted, harassed, and marginalized in the game community, and I want to do work that helps them and do work that forces anyone in games studies to acknowledge this problem in order to be taken seriously.
But here is the thing, while critique is incredibly important, we don’t have to critique every thing to get good work done. We certainly don’t have to cannibalize each other in order to move forward. I got into a Facebook discussion with someone who wrote an article critiquing Sims 4. She argued that 1) the use of “bro” in the game perpetuates the boys club mentality in the industry and 2) that it is outrageous that women are forced to take maternity leave when they have kids but men aren’t (which isn’t totally the case, you can force the kid to grow up and then no one gets leave). To me, these seems like tiny issues that could easily be overlooked because of the little damage they do in order to allow us to spend our energy on things like that the women at EA barely have a sexual harassment policy. She is not wrong that those things in Sims 4 are problematic. Sims 4, however, is incredibly progressive in many ways, and thus I personally don’t feel compelled to critique it. I, instead, spent the weekend writing a grant to start an undergraduate game studies journal and teaching a class on gender issues in the games industry. Well, and write this.
There is no perfect way to do cultural work. You’re always positing groups, excluding people, and doing things that have unforeseen consequences. We need to help each other get better, not invent causes to fight against. Above all, don’t say to someone in your field, who is trying to make things better for a big group of people that they are hurting the people they’re trying to help and making it worse for others. I have never met one person who is qualified to make that statement. Critique the specifics of the work, critique the method, but silencing is never productive, helpful, or useful.
